In software development, a service oriented architecture (SOA) composite application is an assembly of services, service components and references, which are designed and deployed together to meet a particular business need. SOA allows for the development of enterprise applications as modular business web services that can be easily integrated and reused. To rapidly respond to competitors, and best exploit organizational assets, many companies have adopted SOA to accommodate their complex application environments.
Products such as Oracle SOA Suite provide a complete set of service infrastructure components for designing, deploying, and managing composite applications, including allowing services to be created, managed, and orchestrated into composite applications and business or workflow processes. In addition to modeling automated or application-controlled business workflows, products such Oracle SOA Suite can also be used to model human workflows, i.e. those tasks or actions which must be performed by human users within an organization, such as reviewing a particular set of data, or approving a particular set of purchase orders or invoices. Generally, speaking such products include a graphical user interface or similar interface, that allows a process designer to modify the human workflow, to suit the needs of the organization.
Many automated business process or workflow processes use externalized business rules to determine participants in human workflow tasks in the processes. Similarly business rules can also determine the task routing logic. For example, in an expense approval process a business rule can determine the assignees and the workflow task pattern like sequential, parallel approval based on the expense amount. These rules can also determine that any of the participant approves, the task has to sent to the previous approver for review again. However, integrating these business rules in the human workflow tasks is a challenge, because these rules are often called separately from the human workflow task assignment. This requires customers to create complex data and process flow manipulation in process flow languages like BPEL to achieve the integration. This introduces restrictions, errors and process maintenance issues for customers. Secondly modeling complex workflow task routing like review by previous approver, etc. is left to the process modeler and these are not easily implemented. This is the general area that embodiments of the invention are intended to address.